Share This Story!

Nielsen ratings: The news behind the numbers

Dead zone. AMC's The Walking Dead continues to set records: Sunday's fourth-season opener ate up 16.1 million viewers (besting the 12.4 million set for last March's finale), and was last week's top show (?)

Story Highlights

Dead zone. AMC's The Walking Dead continues to set records: Sunday's fourth-season opener ate up 16.1 million viewers (besting the 12.4 million set for last March's finale), and was TV's No. 2 program among young adults last week, and fourth overall.

No wonder. The premiere of ABC spinoff Once Upon a Time in Wonderland did not impress on Thursday with 5.8 million viewers, a lower turnout than last year's casualty Last Resort in the same time period. But 5.5 million was big for Wednesday's opener of FX's American Horror Story: Coven, a record audience for the anthology franchise. (Last year's start: 3.8 million). And the season finale of Hallmark's Cedar Cove notched 2.4 million Saturday, tying a record high.

CW starts: The mini-network delayed most of its premieres, and had a mixed bag, as Monday's Hart of Dixie (1 million viewers) and Beauty and the Beast (860,000) were low, but Tuesday's Supernatural (2.6 million) and Wednesday's Arrow (2.7 million) and the new Tomorrow People (2.3 million) were OK. The network has a high proportion of delayed viewership.

Top 20 shows

Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen for Oct. 7-13. Listings include the week's ranking and viewership.

Data from week ending Oct. 13: Measures number of Twitter messages and total unique audience during and three hours before and after initial broadcast, local time. Excludes sports. Source: Nielsen's SocialGuide